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SHEARON: High-speed wipers out of place on truck |
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Tuesday, 23 October 2007 |
 I’ve been enjoying my new-to-me 1987 Nissan pickup. It gets 26 miles per gallon on the highway, which is pretty neat.
I decided to treat it to some new windshield wiper blades the other day. Problem is, I couldn’t find just the blades. You have to get the whole blade assembly. Back in the stone age I used to sell auto parts, and blades came two-to-a-pack and cost a couple of dollars. You used a pair of pliers to pinch the end clips in order to remove or install them. Took about 10 seconds per side.
I went to several places, and none had just the rubber wiper part. So, resigned to buying the blade assembly, I examined my options. Some places wanted as much as $9 per assembly – or $18 to replace both sides. Ouch.
My daughter and mechanic’s assistant, Kate, was with me, and we took our time, shopping around, until I finally found some on clearance for a buck or so each. The box said they were high-performance wipers. I didn’t care about that, so much as I wanted some good rubber on my windshield.
I bought the blades, a little organizer thing to hold my cell phone and Diet Cokes when I’m running down the road, and two clever screwdriver sets, all for $10.
I got home and pulled the high-performance windshield wipers out of the box. One had a carbon-fiber finish, the other flat black. But they both had these little wing things running their length.
I finally decided the wing things probably weren’t a problem, and Kate and I started struggling with the instructions on installing the blades. There were two pictures and no written instructions. The pictures didn’t make any sense, so we studied the mounting setup on the old wipers and finally figured out how it all went together.
After a few minutes we got the new wipers in place. They look swell. I don’t know if I’ve got the wing things turned the right way or not. Doesn’t matter, I guess, as I don’t plan on fooling with them again until they wear out.
However, the wing things started bothering a little. What were they for? They look kind of neat, but I couldn’t divine any actual usage for them.
Finally, I got on the Internet and sought my answer.
The wing, it turns out, is a spoiler, designed to reduce lift at high speeds. In 35 years of driving, I’ve never really had a problem with that. I wonder how fast you have to go to get your windshield wipers to lift? Apparently over 120 mph, which is as fast as I’ve ever gone in a car (and only the one time). I did 110 once on my motorcycle, but it doesn’t have windshield wipers, and that’s a story for another day anyway.
Where can you drive a car that fast? Certainly not around here. Not enough straight stretches of road to accommodate that. Oh, well, I guess racer types will see my high performance wipers and think I’m a fast dude – in my 20-year-old truck.
Kate is a pretty good mechanic’s assistant. With her smaller hands she can easily get wrenches and screwdrivers to areas I can’t. She helped me take the final drive off my motorcycle one day. That was kind of cool.
She helped me work on the truck over the weekend, from installing the wipers to removing the old radio. I kept getting stuck, and Kate would look at the situation and pronounce, “There’s a screw there and there that have to come out.” And so it went, and in short order we had the old radio out. I hope to have a new one before her next visit so she can help me put it in.
I wonder if I need to get one with a spoiler?
Robert Shearon is news editor of the Courier. His column appears weekly.
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